


a stolen connection we can't quite shake

by wolfwithpanthereyes



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Background Audrey Parker/Nathan Wuornos, M/M, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-10-26 12:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20742212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfwithpanthereyes/pseuds/wolfwithpanthereyes
Summary: Nathan suffers from a memory-loss Trouble and Duke's stuck babysitting him until Audrey can fix it. The one memory Nathan does manage to drag up? Well, it's a memory Duke certainly wasn't expecting an amnesiac Nathan to drag up.





	a stolen connection we can't quite shake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PeterHaleforAlpha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeterHaleforAlpha/gifts).

The _Haven Herald_ should totally come with a free bingo card. You could cut it out and stick it on your fridge, and every now and then someone would call out “Hey! You hear about that freak hailstorm/fire/animal attack/insert other weird things here/etc that happened?”, and you would get to mark the most relevant square to the current Trouble off your card. Maybe get a free magnet with completion of a bingo so the Troubles could at least bring a little joy into the world.

Duke definitely needs to tell Vince and Dave this idea sometime, and then upon receiving his card, he can stamp out ‘Amnesia Trouble’ and be one step closer to that promised magnet.

Because of _course_ there was going to be a memory loss Trouble. They’d been through just about every other sci-fi trope Duke could think of (not that Duke watched much sci-fi himself - it was totally acceptable for a grown man to enjoy soap operas, right?), and so having Audrey arriving on the Gray Gull’s doorstep and thrusting an oddly subdued Nathan at him, raving about how she needed to go solve this _now_ and _you can keep an eye on him for five minutes right? Right, Duke?_, was just another Tuesday, really.

So here he was. Restocking the bar and keeping half an eye on a highly confused and Trouble-influenced Nathan Wuornos. Not that Nathan needed much watching currently; he seemed too preoccupied with the revelation that he couldn’t feel anything to be much of a hassle.

“Woah, there!” Duke quickly dropped the bag of tomatoes he was carrying and snatched the fork Nathan was holding away, making a mental note to get either Audrey or Nathan to pay him back for the squished ketchup mess that was definitely going to leave a stain on the floorboards. “What do you reckon you’re doing?”

Nathan stared at him blankly, and then down at Duke’s hand as it grasped his wrist. Duke had been a second too late; droplets of blood were already welling from tiny pinpricks across Nathan’s palm, fresh marks against old scars.

“I can’t feel it,” Nathan muttered, the first words he’d said since being shoved into the Gull.

“Yeah, well.” Duke resisted the urge to just wipe the blood away (releasing his own Crocker curse in front of Nathan? A _terrible_ idea even when Nathan was fully un-Troubled and aware) and leaned across the bar for a teatowel. He adjusted his grip on Nathan's wrist, sliding his hand so the back of Nathan's hand lay heavy on his palm. With his other hand, Duke dabbed the blood away with perhaps more gentleness than he would have done for an un-Troubled Nathan. It didn't help that Nathan was staring at him with eyes as wide and hesitant as they had been when kid Duke had bundled a kid Nathan into his arms after _that_ sledding incident. “That’s no excuse to go around hurting yourself, you hear?”

“But I can’t-” Nathan broke off with a bite of his bottom lip, trying to jerk his injured hand away as Duke pressed down a little too firmly. Almost as if, for a moment, his nerve endings kicked in and he could feel it, all of it.

“Hey, hey! It’s alright, you didn’t push it in _that_ deep,” Duke said hastily in a half-hearted attempt at comfort, and after a long moment Nathan's shoulders unclenched.__

So. Memory loss Trouble. Probably a good idea to probe a bit, see what damage had been done until Audrey fixed it up, like she always did.

Duke checked Nathan’s hand was clean - the cuts had been shallow and stopped bleeding relatively quickly, that was a bonus - before tossing the teatowel into the pile of disused towels behind the bar. Mentally waving a fond farewell to Taco Tuesday prep, he swung himself up onto a barstool. “C’mon, sit.” He patted the seat next to him invitingly.

Nathan normally would have rolled his eyes at this point and either gone for a totally different stool or made up some excuse to keep his distance from Duke (or probably to get back to Audrey). Instead, he did as he was told without protesting, clumsily perching besides Duke and clutching at the bar, staring down at his feet as if the ground were too far away for him. Again Duke was reminded of kid Nathan, his memories fastforwarding to after the sledding incident when Nathan was (Duke would figure later) first struggling to live with his Trouble.

“So.” Duke leaned against the bar, keeping it cool, keeping it casual. “What do you remember, Nate? Anything?”

“Dunno. It’s all kind of… fuzzy. Stuff’s there, but I can’t grasp it.” Nathan shrugged, still gazing at the ground. “I thought my name was Nathan?”

“Nate’s a nickname. Shorter version of Nathan.“ Duke had only been calling Nathan Nate since they were in kindergarten, and it kind of stung that Nathan didn’t remember. He wished Audrey was here, with her innate ability of helping people through the Troubles. “C’mon, work with me. Anything at all?”

The crease between Nathan’s brows furrowed in concentration. “Umm… that woman I was with? She’s… I’m sure she’s important to me, somehow.” 

_Speak of the devil._

Something twisted ever so slightly in Duke’s insides, something that muttered _oh, is she? Is she really? Never could have guessed_. He ignored it and leaned over the bar, resisting the Scotch and pouring a glass of tap water instead. “Yeah, she is,” he agreed, because what else could he say, and again his insides did that weird shimmy thing. Which was ridiculous, because of _course_ Audrey was important to Nathan, the same way Audrey was important to Duke (and a little more, as was obvious to anyone with eyes). “Anything else?” 

Nathan finally lifted his head. For someone struggling to grasp at every memory he’d ever had, his expression was oddly calm. “I reckon you’re important to me too, yeah?” 

“Audrey wouldn’t have let me babysit you otherwise." 

The corners of Nathan’s mouth twitched upwards, a flicker of something that was almost a smile. “You must be pretty reliable.”

Duke couldn’t help it; he grinned wide. “Yeah? Sure, let’s call it that!” Where had he left his phone again? Duke could do with recording this, maybe play it back to Nathan once his memory was fully restored. That admission alone would have been all the blackmail Duke needed for life. 

“Reliable and important.” Nathan muttered the words to himself. “Yeah, I definitely know you, it’s just… urgh, it’s not _sticking_. Like there’s-” He raised a hand, waving it slightly as if attempting to copy the Genovian wave (okay, so Duke also liked the occasional chick-flick, so what?). “Okay, I’m getting something. Snow, I think. And, uh… concrete? The ground was cold and hard and I could still feel stuff." 

Snow and concrete. Yep, here was the sledding incident memory. “You were like eight,” Duke said, encouraging him along. 

Nathan did the brow furrow thing again. “I was older than that. _You_ were older than that. I was outside and it was cold and it started snowing and you had this - this weird patterned tie on..." Nathan smoothed a hand down over his own chest, mimicking where a tie would have hung if he had been wearing one, "and…”

Duke’s hand involuntarily tightened around his glass. 

Oh. 

_Oh._

This wasn’t the first memory of Nathan’s Trouble at all. 

“Like the Jolly Roger?” Duke suggested. "With like, a skull and crossbones pattern?" 

The confusion on Nathan’s face slid swiftly into realisation, and what do you know, Duke’s heart was the organ giving a weird skip this time. “Yeah, that’s right!” 

“That’s…” Duke swigged the rest of his water back before shoving the glass down onto the bar with a solid clunk, swinging himself off the stool and heading behind the counter. He resolutely did not look at Nathan because _wow_, of all the things he had to go and remember - _that_. “That’s great, Nate, real great! You’ll be remembering everything again in no time, I bet!” 

“It looked ridiculous on you, but you weren’t wearing it properly,” Nathan was saying, and Duke pointedly slammed a chopping board down hard on the counter in an attempt to not hear what Nathan was saying because _god_, Duke knew that memory way too well. Nevermind they had both spent the better part of a decade dancing around each other and pretending it had never happened. Duke still thought of it way too often, particularly since Nathan and him had eased into yet another tentative friendship. 

“It was snowing, and you were warm, and-” 

Nathan stopped talking abruptly, and Duke very narrowly avoided dropping another bag of tomatoes on the floor to its squishy death. 

“Okay Nate, I get the picture, can we just-” 

“Duke?” 

Within five seconds Nathan’s voice had changed abruptly - no more eagerness, no more reminiscence. Duke glanced up, already guessing what he’d see - Nathan was back, memories fully intact, and Duke didn’t want to think about how he could easily tell the difference between _this_ Nathan and the Nathan he’d seen five seconds ago with a mere glance. 

“Take it Audrey solved the Trouble, huh?” Duke fixed a grin in place and leaned across the bar to clap a hand against Nathan’s shoulder. “Welcome back, Nate.” 

Nathan seemed to flinch - which, okay, Duke probably imagined, because Nathan couldn’t _feel_ and thus wouldn’t be able to react to Duke’s touch. “Yeah, looks like she did. That was - wow, that was weird.” 

“We’ve been through weirder.” Duke debated whether or not to just leave it there, and then thought, _oh screw it, I’ve gotta know._

“I guess-” Nathan said, at the same moment Duke blurted out “Was prom night really the only thing you could remember?” 

Nathan’s response was a near perfect deer-caught-in-the-headlights imitation. “Huh?” 

“Snow, concrete, weird tie.” Duke threw his hands up in the air, determined to finally get this into the open now that Nathan had finally brought it up. They’d been pretending it didn’t happen for long enough. “C’mon, that was _totally_ the winter prom! When else did I ever wear that stupid tie you bought me for Christmas?" 

“I… I, umm…” Oh great, Nathan was _stuttering_ now. “Look, it was a random thing I picked up on, okay? It doesn’t _mean_ anything!” 

“Right, right.” Duke rolled his eyes, folding his arms and resting them on the bar as he leaned across. “Us making out that night clearly didn’t mean anything. Sorry you brought it up.” 

“I had no control over what I remembered!” Nathan shot back, and this time his brows were furrowed in frustration. Now here was the Nathan Duke knew. “It was just - there was next to nothing I knew, Duke, I just picked up on the first thing I could think of. I didn’t even remember the kissing part!” He stumbled over "kissing" with a slight stutter and drop of his voice, like he was confessing to something shameful. Maybe he thought he was. 

“But you remember it now, huh?” 

They glared at each other over the bar, Nathan’s shoulders high and tense, Duke refusing to move an inch. This was familiar territory, arguing was what they were good at. 

“So what if I do?” Nathan said finally, breaking first. “So what? It’s something that happened. We were young and idiots and I’d drunk too much of that spiked punch and you were wearing the tie I’d given you. It was easy back then. It’s no more than a memory now. The Trouble brought it up, not me.“ 

“You sure bout that, Nate?” 

Nathan glowered, but Duke was spared his retort by Audrey shoving open the door of the Gull and declaring the Trouble was 100% fixed now. 

“Gimme a drink, Duke, I need one.” She slid onto the stool beside Nathan and Duke watched as Nathan softened instantly in her presence, the way he’d never relaxed around Duke. Not since that damn prom night, anyway. 

_Whatever._ Nathan was right, it was nothing more than a memory. 

“One drink coming right up,” Duke replied, forcing a grin. “Let’s hear about how you solved this one. And Audrey, we totally need to get that bingo card idea on to Vince and Dave, am I right or am I right?” 


End file.
